Other admirers of Philip K. Dick may find what he had to say on the topic of the Demiurge in his Exegesis helpful, or at least interesting.

Here is some of PKD’s own artwork, which he uses to illustrate some fairly profound ideas concerning how an imperfect universe actually came into existence, the handiwork of the Demiurge: an imperfect, lesser God.

“Here is a modified, more precise model. The Urgrund [primal basis of reality] contains the yang-yin complementary bipolarities within it. It wishes to separate its opposites, & does this by projecting the artifact, the creator of our reality (world); this is YHWH. This is what Mani & the Gnostics correctly saw 1) about the nature of the creator; & 2) the nature of our world. They also saw the salvific stranger God ‘outwitting the archons’ & penetrating our ‘copy of a copy’ world to extricate us. According to this model the Good (Form I) which we experience is a sort of invader, unable to coerce or compel the frozen BIP [Black Iron Prison] template, but on the other hand, the Good (Form I) is real in a sense that Form II—which is a copy of a copy—is not. Thus we can call the template projected ceaselessly by the artifact dead or counterfeit, & Form I (Zebra) the authentic (Good, Form I), & thus agree with Parmenides.

“To repeat: Form I, which represents not only God or Christ or St. Sophia, is found at the outskirts or trash or bottom level of this world, as far from the imperial omphalos [navel; center] of power as possible. This would adequately account for the way Jesus appeared at the First Advent. But the Second Advent (actually the remaining section of the First) will consist of a direct & successful attack on the inner fortress of imperial power itself… But, put another way, this has always already happened if we are to accept the formulation of Parmenides in denying actuality to Form II & calling it only seeming (i.e., Dokos veil or counterfeit). There is something spurious about it, however real it may seem. It is a copy of a copy, whereas Form I is, in contrast, authentic. My set ground experience bears this out. Set was alive; ground was mere sarx. In a sense, time has devoured Form II; it died somewhere along the line & leaves the line & leaves only an imprint of an empty shape. It is a hologram, but Form I is not a hologram or mere projected image. So the McKenna is only partially right; in a sense our universe is a hologram, but Zebra (Form I, nods) is not. But Zebra is not part of our universe; it is an invader into it—which was my great insight 15 months ago. Authentic reality has breached through into our world—which signifies that the end times have come (maybe long ago) but the irreal, the hologram, effaces it from our perception. The true great revelation (Gnosis) is precisely this: that Zebra (Form I, the Urgrund) has come already.

[...]

“By the very nature it is deus absconditus [hidden god], but hidden close by (‘Break a stick & there is Jesus.’). One can reread and reinterpret all scripture from the vantage point of this understanding. Many puzzling aspects can herewith be newly comprehended—why no natural theology has ever been successful— why our knowledge of God must always be a revealed knowledge. ‘The workman is invisible within the workshop.’ Immanent & gentle—one might say tenderly, ‘the shy God.’”

(A portion of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, originally written by PKD in 1978, and first published in In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, by Lawrence Sutkin, Ed. in 1991.)